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Mr. President : "We are driven this day to God. Apart 
from His Word, and His grace to make His "Word effectual, 
and to keep it even in the hearts of His children from perver- 
sion, there is no hope in the heart of any political party, nor 
any Christian party, for the poor slave. We have seen that 
men of piety, age, grey hairs, experience, eloquence, can plead 
the very authority of the Word of God for concealing and de- 
nying that Word ; can call upon Christ to bear witness that 
their first Christian duty is to take down His light from the 
candlestick and to put it under a bushel ; can deliberately in 
the name of God so pervert the salt of Christian truth as to 
make it nothing but an additional corrupting element on the 
dunghill of the world's corruptions. We have seen an eloquent 
Bishop, with silver locks, pleading for silence on the sin of slav- 
ery, and justifying the Executive Committee of the Tract So- 
ciety, as possessing an indestructible negative against the in- 
structions of their constituents, and in opposition to the will and 
Word of God, by virtue of being the managers of a great cir- 
cumlocution office, the perfection of whose sagacity and strength 
is in the art. How not to do it. We cannot but remember the 
answer of God : " To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth 
it not, to him it is sin ; " and the judgment of the Lord Jesus : 
" Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my 
brethren, ye did it not to me." 

We have also seen venerable and Christian men not shrink- 
ing to denounce the declaration that American slavery is a sin, 
as ultra and inexpedient, and exposing the cause of righteous- 

1 



I THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

ness to defeat and ruin. Paul rejoiced, in liis day, that he had 
not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God. Tlie professed 
followers of Paul in our day do not shun to rebuke such decla- 
ration as fanatical and rash. Before such developments, were 
it not that our trust is in God and not man, we should have no 
more any strength, or life, or courage left in us. There is no 
hope, apart from God's "Word, and from the full and faithful 
application of it. There is wanting the element of conscien- 
tious, stubborn, heartfelt, eternal hostility against slavery as 
sin, as reprobated and forbidden of God in the same catalogue 
with lying, perjury, murder, whoremongering, piracy, man- 
stealing, and guilt, that, by the law not of God only, but man, 
is worthy of death. Where shall such an element be found ? 
How shall it be created, quickened, trained ? Not in the school 
of political self-seeking and expediency ; not under obedience 
to fugitive slave laws ; not under proclamations and assertions 
of allegiance to Dred Scott decisions ; not in the school of un- 
righteous and oppressive statutes ; not under the law of silence 
on the Word of God — silence in the pulpit — silence in the 
Tract House ; but under the law of fire and thunder in the 
manifestation of the truth to every man's conscience in the 
sight of God — by revealing the wrath of God from heaven 
against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men, and against 
this stupendous iniquity as foremost and most germinating in 
enormity and malignity, most sweeping and accumulating in 
the habits and materials of sin and miser}', tlie elements and 
securities of national ruin. Our only hope is in the revived, 
living, faithful religion of a free, out-spoken, consistent church, 
and a fearless, unmuzzled, faithful ministry. Our only hope is 
in a conscience fastened to the Word of God, and a heart flam- 
ing with its sacred fire ; a popular church and ministry, hold- 
ing forth the word of life, and giving themselves up to its su- 
premacy, in such an unrestricted abandonment of all things to 
its sovereignty (not tlie popular sovereignty, but God's sover- 
eignty), that it may have free course and be glorified. 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 3 

The intensity of the plague with u<, the exasperation and 
strength of the iniquity and the evil, are in the provisions for 
its perpetuity, and the insurances of its increase. Not content 
with enduring it ourselves, for one generation, we have l)y law 
entailed it upon others ; and the generations to come, as God 
distributes the consequences, must inevitably rise up and call 
each preceding generation accursed. If this sin had a possible 
death, like that of intemperance in the grave of the present 
drunkard, and were not propagated by a legal fatalism forbid- 
ding it to die out, or to be renounced, or the will to be broken 
— a legal fatalism and missionary zeal united, providing fu- 
ture victims for it in the fastest ratio of increase in human 
population — then would the evil be comparatively trifling, 
and the sin would speedily come to an end. But there is no 
such limit, no such natural consumption or wearing out, no 
such release by death ; the evil and the sin are carefully st- 
cured against death, and injected, as the heart's blood, into the 
veins of the next generation, and any attempt to stop the pro- 
cess throws the whole system into convulsions. 

TVe practice the iniquity upon children, innocent children, the 
natives of our own land, unbought, unsold, unpaid for, without 
consultation or consent of father or mother, or the shadow of a 
permission from the Almighty ; and they, the new-born babes 
of t^-'s system, are the compound interest year by year added 
to tii^ ^nd its capital, which thus doubles upon us in the 

next generation, and must treble in another. We make use of 
the most sacred domestic affections, of maternal, filial, and, I 
was going to say, connubial love — but the system forbids, and 
IhixvQ io B2ij contubemal — for such rapid and accumulating 
production of the iniquity, as shall be in some measure ade- 
quate to the demand. The whole fomily relation, the whole 
domestic state, is prostituted, poisoned, turned into a misery- 
making machine for the agent of all evil. TThat God meant 
should be the source and inspiration of happiness, becomes the 
fountain of sin and woe. The sacred names of husband, wife. 



4 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

father, mother, son, daughter, babe, become the exponents of 
various forces and values in the slave-breeding institute. And 
the whole perfection, completeness, and concentration of this 
creative power in this manufacturing interest, descends like a 
trip-hammer on the children, beating them from the birth into 
marketable articles, and stamping and sealing them as chattels, 
foredoomed and fatalized to run till they wear out, as living 
spindles, wheels, activities of labor and productiveness, in the 
same horrible system. 

And each generation of immortal marketable stuff is as 
exactly foshioned in these grooves, moulds, channels, wefted, 
netted, and drawn through, to come out the invariable product, 
as the yards of carpeting are cut from the loom to be trodden 
on, or as the coins drop from the die for the circulation of 
society. This is the peculiarity of the sin of slavery in the 
foremost Christian country on the face of the earth. In this 
branch of native industry and manufacture we are self-reliant. 
Disavowing a protective policy in almost everything else, we 
are proudly patriotic for the security, superiority and abun- 
dance of this most sacred native product of domestic manufac- 
ture, and for neither the raw material nor the bleaching of it 
will depend on any other country in the world. 

This is the manner, these are the principles, on which we 
obey the precepts and fulfil the glories of the 7 2d Psalm- 
Instead of obeying God in delivering the children of the needy 
from deceit and violence, we foredoom them to all the oppres- 
sion endured by their fathers; instead of judging the poor with 
righteousness and the children of the oppressed with equity, 
we deliberately and solemnly give them over to oppression, as 
incapable of brotherhood and citizenship, and having no rights 
that white men are bound to respect. Instead of removing 
every yoke, we predestinate them for the yoke, and perpetu- 
ate the yoke for them, as a fixture prepared from the birth — 
the controlling, governing, supreme domestic law — the guid- 
ing institution and policy of the house, the State, the nation. 



AND THE DUTY OP^ THE MINISTRY. 5 

By thus laying our grasp on an unborn race ; by saying 
beforehand to immortal beings, the work of the Creator, you 
cannot come into God's world but as infant slaves, articles of 
property and merchandise, but with a curse of our national 
justice and equity branding you for the slave-pen, and sepa- 
rating you from the manhood of all mankind ; by this robbery 
from God and man we become a nation of men-stealers — a 
community of baptized Thugs for the kidnapping of the chil- 
dren of four millions of people, and the assassination of their 
personality. 

If this were done now, for the first time, to a nation by 
themselves ; if we made a descent upon Africa, China, India, 
or elsew^here, and carried off into hopeless slavery the children 
of four millions, the universe would utter a roar of terror and 
indignation at such a crime. But organize it into a system — 
make this robbery and moral assassination a fixture of law and 
policy from generation to generation, and set up its support as 
the w^atchword of a powerful political party, the test of faith- 
fulness and patriotism, and the security of an unlimited com- 
mand of the whole patronage of the United States Govern- 
ment, and forthwith the sanction and sustaining of it become 
the shining virtue of compromise and expediency, and he is 
the dangerous man and the madman in the community who 
undertakes to disturb this arrangement, or to agitate the con- 
science in regard to it. Forthwith, it is no longer the sin 
which is regarded with astonishment and horror, but the de- 
nunciation of it as sin ! It is no longer the perpetrators of 
such a crime, and its supporters, who are to be the objects of 
reproach and condemnation, but those who cause the truth to 
bear against the crime — those who call it by the name with 
which God has branded it, and visit it with the reprobation 
that God has laid upon it. 

And especially the political w^orld and the Pharisees of 
political churches stand in horror of the very bad spirit, the 
unchristian spirit, of those who denounce this wickedness with 
1* 



6 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

the direct application of the word of God. It is a subject 
which must be excluded from the pulpit, because it is a sin 
enthroned in state, a political sin, to be treated only by politi- 
cal quacks, with political drenches, platforms, cataplasms and 
compromises, which the only duty of the Church and the 
ministry is quietly to indorse and sanction, for the sake of 
peace. 

The system of Slavery is now at length asserted to be the 
chosen missionary institute of the Lord Almighty. And, ad- 
mitting it to be such, we are certainly foremost of all the na- 
tions in carrying forward the great missionary work. If the 
appointed work to be done for the children of the needy is 
that of branding and training them as chattels and brute beasts 
for the market, we have no rivals in this honor. This is, in 
fact, the greatest, vastest, most persevering missionary work 
that we perform. Our instrumentality in binding down in 
hopeless bondage the children of four millions of immortal 
beings, guilty of a skin not colored like our own, is our largest 
instrumentality, thus far, in the glories of the millenium. 

By our laws providing that the slave and its increase shall 
be deemed and doomed our personal chattels forever, we con- 
stitute for them a millenium of sin and misery. We convert 
them into a community, in which it is impossible that the fun- 
damental laws of Christianity should be recognized and 
obeyed, or the most commonly acknowledged and most sacred 
institutions of the Christian state be regarded. The laws of 
God for husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, 
children, cannot be applied, cannot be obeyed, in such a com- 
munity. '^ Husbands, love your wives," is a divine injunction. 
But for those most miserable outcasts of humanity, the Ameri- 
can slaves, there can be no such law, but an admonition against 
it. God's claims, so expressed, interfere with man's property 
in man. Husbands, beware of imagining that you have any 
rights, any authority, in regard to the chattels you are per- 
mitted to live with ; beware of ever so loving them as to be 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 7 

unwilling to sacrifice them at a moment's warning to the ava- 
rice, the need, or the passions, of your owners. Ye are not 
permitted to love, but only in subjection to the price of the 
market, the necessities of your master, and the grand rule of 
your domestic institution, the slave and its increase. 

Wives, be obedient to your husbands. What ? Obedience 
from a chattel to a chattel ? Wives ye are none, and this 
divine law belongs not to you, but for the profit of your mas- 
ters. Your obedience and your increase belong to them, and 
to none else. 

Children, obey your parents. But slaves have no children, 
and their children have no parents, except only as the bales 
of cotton have a parent in the gin and the factory, where they 
were shaped and bonded for the market. These commands 
and precepts are all and only for the masters, not the slaves. 
Slaves have no ties, no affections, no duties, no obligations, no 
belongings, but for their owners, whose property they are, and 
for whom and at their bidding every faculty, capacity, emotion, 
must be devoted, occupied, tasted, improved, sold at the high- 
est premium to the highest bidder whenever, however, and 
wherever, the owner's interest requires it. 

And it is not isolated beings that we devote thus, for a mere 
lifetime, to such degradation and cruelty, but we create a per- 
petual, unfailing, and self-renewing spring of this wickedness. 
It is not a transitory shower of blistering drops that we cause 
to pass over the land, but an Artesian well that we sink of do- 
mestic shame and misery for future generations. In the word 
of God it is said, referring to the glory and blessedness of the 
establishment of righteousness and freedom as the fundamental 
fixtures of society, " If thou take away from the midst of thee 
the yoke, thou shalt raise up the foundations of many genera- 
tions." But we, by foredooming unborn children to the yoke, 
and preparing it for them, are securing a succession of curses 
and crimes, crimes and curses, as the heritage of the social 
state. AVe have no more right to enact by law that the off- 



8 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

spring of slaves shall be slaves, than we have to make a law 
that the offspring of the free whites shall be slaves. If such a 
law were passed in the State of New York, a law that the 
children of those engaged in manual labor should from the birth 
be taken and held as chattels, to be bought and sold as the 
property of those capitalists for whom their parents have been 
laboring, could such a law sanction such a crime ? Could it 
make it any other than man-stealing ? Could it be pleaded 
that it is not man-stealing, because it is children-stealing ? 
What is it when these children grow up ? 

And if they have children, does the fact that their parents 
were stolen before them give the stealers of the parents any 
claim upon the next generation? Does the fact that their 
parents were stolen before them, take away their rights as hu- 
man beings, and turn the stealing of them into a natural and 
just claim of property ? Nothing can transmit the right of 
theft ; no law can sanction it ; even if we had a right to steal 
the parents from themselves, this could give no right to steal 
the children from the parents and from God. This is the 
deep damnation of our guilt. The offence cries up to heaven. 
By stealing children from the birth, we are a nation of men- 
STEALERS, and we renew, perpetuate and increase the guilt 
from generation to generation. We perpetuate the sin and the 
cruelty upon five times the number that our ancestors did, and 
insure its being perpetrated by five times more, and then 
thank God for the success of this providential missionary insti- 
tution. 

The guilt is increasing, but all the while the conscience in 
regard to it is diminishing and being seared. The sin, by being 
enlarged in surface and in quantity, seems lessened in inten- 
sity. We are more guilty than our fathers in the practice of 
it, and yet we contrive to make ourselves imagine that we are 
less guilty and more pious than they. The iniquity is a moral 
cancer that is eating at the vitals of our piety, Avhile the only 
treatment we tolerate is increased doses of chloroform, till the 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 9 

whole system is stupefied under its influence. "When a new 
outrage is committed, wc just send to the apothecaries for more 
laudanum, or swallow, through our representatives, a Lecomp- 
ton drench and sweat, or suffer Congress to administer an 
English swindle. Never was a sick and groaning victim more 
completely at the mercy of unprincipled quacks. Every six 
months some new experiment of fraud, despotism, bribery, un- 
principled and ignorant political surgery, and we are hauled 
and tossed about, and cut and skinned, as if we were a dead 
body in the dissecting-room, and Congress nothing but a class 
of raw, headstrong, roaring medical students, with their knives 
in their hands, and Dunglison's Anatomy in their pockets. The 
body does not wince, does not kick, does not even protest ; and 
so they keep cutting and carving, no outrage as yet attempted 
being so mons^trous as to have gone beyond the people's tame 
endurance. 

Our iniquitous and cruel career against the African race 
came to its climax in the Dred Scott decision ; for when in- 
iquity takes the place of national law, and is enthroned in the 
tribunal of justice, it cannot well go higher ; and now that 
decision, unresisted, uncorrected, is producing its fruits. It is 
like the star wormwood cast upon all fountains of waters, and 
men drink and die. Our public officials of justice and of pol- 
icy, from the highest to the lowest, every time they are about 
to enact a new violence against the oppressed, only have to 
refer to the Dred Scott decision, and the basest, meanest, most 
detestable acts of fraud and cruelty, are converted into right- 
eousness. 

From the Secretary of State down through files of marshals, 
judges, bailiffs, lawyers, to the conductor of the street rail-car, 
the word passes, and the policy is established, and it is oflicially 
announced, and the judicial dictum is reverberated and ap- 
plauded and applied, that black men have no rights that white 
men are bound to respect. This dictum is fast being welded 
into chains, into political precedents sealed and made sure, and 



10 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

snare after snare in the iron net is woven on by lies, by perver- 
sions of the Constitution and of history, by new measures of 
usurpation unresisted, by presumptuous, unauthorized interpre- 
tation of hiw, till the very breath of the black man is almost 
beaten out of his body, and he is refused the privilege of ex- 
panding his lungs in a Republican atmosphere. Our judges, 
Cabinet ministers, attorneys-general and local, and Secretaries 
of State, are hunting up examples of old injustice, for prece- 
dents of new villany. They thus set immorality and cruelty in 
the fountains of justice, infecting all its elements with death, 
just as vile assassins poison the wells of their neighbors by 
throwing dead dogs into them, or the carcasses of cats and 
skunks. 

As God declared in a case fearfully similar, they have turned 
judgment into gall and wormwood, and the fruit of righteous- 
ness into hemlock. They hunt every man his brother, with a 
net. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the 
prince asketh, and the judge asketh, for a reward ; and the 
great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire, and so they 
wrap it up. The best of them is as a brier ; the most upright 
is sharper than a thorn hedge; they trust in vanity, and speak 
lies ; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity ; they 
hatch cockatrice's eggs, and weave the spider's web ; he that 
eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh 
out into a viper. There is no judgment in their goings ; they 
have made them crooked paths, speaking oppression, conceiv- 
ing and uttering from the heart words of falsehood, so that 
judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar 
off. They are never so happy as when they conceive absolute 
mischief, the dregs of profound social ignorance, prejudice and 
depravity, framing mischief by a law which thenceforward they 
impose as the supreme political and moral state god. They 
set up the sin of slavery as law, enforce it by the Constitution, 
under judicial opinions, to which they swear allegiance, and if 
they cannot discover precedents, they make them. 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 11 

The Secretary of State dares publicly to afFirin that no black 
man ever received a passport, and caimot, as a citizen, receive 
one, and shall not. The Dred Scott decision has prepared this 
lid for the black man's living sepulchre, and Secretary Cass 
acts the undertaker for the body, and screws down the coffin 
with an incontrovertible falsehood. Then the Secretary of the 
Treasury declares that a free negro cannot receive a register 
for his own vessel, nor be master of his own vessel, nor, as such, 
have any title to his own property by United States marine 
papers, for, by the Dred Scott decision, he is no citizen, and 
can be none, and to be the rightful owner and master of his 
own maritime property, a man must be a citizen. As he has 
none of the rights of a citizen, any seafaring man may own 
him, but he cannot himself be the owner of so much as a plank 
or a nail in his own vessel. Then comes, on the heels of this 
outrage, the United States Land Commissioner, and from the 
General Land Office, with the same despotic authority, under 
the same infernal act, declares that persons of color have no 
right of purchase and ownership in the public lands, that privi- 
lege also being restricted by positive law to citizens of the 
United States, or those that intend to become such ; and by the 
Dred Scott decision, a man with a colored skin neither is, nor 
can become, nor can without treason intend to become, a citi- 
zen. So, by this decision, and these magisterial interpretations 
and enforcements of it, the human being with a skin not colored 
like our own is alienated and expelled from land and sea — is 
an exile everywhere, and, even on the great highway of na- 
tions, no better than a log, or a snag, or a shred of drifting sea- 
weed, over which the keel of a Christian civilization plunges, 
with all on board grinning approbation of the cruelty. And 
certainly, if God's word be not thundered against such crimes, 
the Church and the ministry do, by their silence, set the seal 
of a Christian approbation on all this. Our revivals of reli- 
gion become accessory to it, if a fawning, cringing, whining 
piety, trembling in the fear of man, refuses to beai' testimony 
against such wickedness. 



12 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

And thus, more and more, the common heart and conscience 
are hardened against all remorse and repentance in such vil- 
lany, and each new Administration of the Slave Power be- 
comes the executor of some new and more atrocious scheme of 
fraud and tyranny, left in trust as a legacy by its predecessor. 
And men that have kept silent up to the present crisis, have 
had their capacity of dumbness, their grace of silence, thor- 
oughly tried ; they are, indeed, dumb dogs, that no provocation is 
likely to set to barking. If they have not yet spoken, they 
will forever hold their peace. What form of this wickedness 
can be transacted worse than the shapes in which it has already 
been enthroned and legalized ? Would the open revival of the 
slave trade be any greater atrocity than the decision that a 
human being, with a colored skin, though born in this country, 
and free born, and under this government, cannot be a citizen 
of the United States, and has no rights that white men are 
bound to respect ? 

When this iniquity was, by this declaration and decision, 
publicly inaugurated in the supreme tribunal of national jus- 
tice ; when, in defiance of God's appointment and consecration 
of the judgment seat for himself, this most astounding cruelty 
and robbery were proclaimed as the rule of national justice, 
by which men were let loose for all manner of villany against 
a whole race of human beings, we imagined that the pulpit 
would have spoken out, if it never had before, in reprobation 
of an enormity in a Christian nation so atrocious, so unrivalled. 
The Sabbath after that prodigious judicial crime, it seemed as 
if the very Bibles would have burst open of their own accord, 
and that in living fire the lightning of God's Word Avould al- 
most have burned its sentence on the walls, and hissed along 
the congi'egations. We thought that even men whose lips had 
been sealed up to that time would have broken that silenc^ 
forever, and directed the thunders of divine truth against such 
fearful public enshrinement and enforcement of undissembled, 
undisputed inhumanity and falsehood. Instead of that, there 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 13 

was a tame and almost unquestioning acquiescence ; and the 
men that did speak out were themselves denounced as mad 
accusers and revilers of God's appointed dignities. Instead of 
denouncing the sin, men, ministers, and editors denounced the 
denunciation of it as the greatest sin. It had come to pass 
literally, as in the 59tli chapter of Isaiah, that judgment was 
turned away backward, and justice stood afar off, for truth was 
fallen in the street, and equity could not enter. Yea, truth 
faileth, and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey ; 
and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Ilim that there was no 
judgment. 

If ever the Church and the ministry were going to speak 
out, it should have been then ; and if not then, I do not know 
that any revival of religion, on the same principles, of the same 
type, will produce utterance. But the calamity to a nation, 
when the Church and ministry are thus unfaithful to their 
trust, is not to be computed ; nor, on the other hand, is the 
blessing to a nation possible to be measured, when it has a 
Church and ministry that it cannot corrupt nor silence. The 
Church is God's own enshrinement among a people of the liv- 
ing sense of right and wrong, the perception of God's claims, 
and the sensibility to them ; and where that sensibility is vivid 
among the people, there is always the knowledge of their own 
rights and the spirit to defend them. But where that sensibil- 
ity to sin, and to God's claims, dies out, where the Church 
does not apply God's Word against sin, there both the con- 
science toward God and the spirit of liberty are debauched and 
wasted, and the nation ripens for destruction. Even the most 
fatal oppression, the most vital injuries are not felt, or are 
submitted to with servile endurance. 

Can we go any lower, any deeper, than the Dred Scott de- 
cision and its consequences ? The disease having, like a run 
of typhus fever, reached its lowest stage, will there be a reac- 
tion of nature toward health? Is there strengtli enough ? At 
this point, docs conscience act under the Word of God ? At 
2 



14 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

this point, is the Word of God being apphed? The Divine 
Spirit is present, as a power of individual salvation, but still, 
under habitual indifference, there may be a palsv of the con- 
science in regard to this sin. An individual was met recently 
by a friend, who asked him how it was with him, and he said 
he had been busy all winter in the revival, and was at a morn- 
ing prayer meeting every morning at 6 o'clock. In the course 
of the conversation, he was asked how he felt in regard to the 
iniquity going on in Congress. Oh, said he, I don't trouble 
myself about that at all, and as long as I and my family get 
enough to eat and to drink. Congress may do what they choose; 
I have no concern about it. Now, of what possible avail can 
be whole churches of such Christians, or what effect can tons 
of such piety have upon the morals of the community, or how 
will revivals of religion reach the sins of the nation, if piety 
is content with eating and drinking, and attendance at 8 o'clock 
morning ^^(rayers, while the nation marches steadily to wrath 
and ruin ? 

If the Church at large are under such infatuation, then, in- 
deed, the nation is ready to perish ; for the Church is the salt 
of the earth, the conscience of the nation ; and if that salt 
have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted ? If the con- 
science of the Church is corrupted and darkened, the nation 
has no means of knowing its own evils, and may be far ad- 
vanced towards irremediable destruction. The conscience of 
the Church is the only conscience that pretends to be guided 
by the Word of God, and by that Word a living conscience in 
the Church and ministry must be the nation's watchman. 

One of the darkest and most distressing symptoms in the 
progress of this iniquity is the insensibility of the popular 
conscience under outrages that we once supposed, if any ap- 
proximation to them were perpetrated, were even attempted, 
would set the nation in a blaze. Even Mr. Webster used to 
talk of the danger of experiments upon the conscience of the 
country ; but we find no hazard attending them. Outrage 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 15 

upon outrage is quietly endured, until the people become ac- 
customed to be trampled on, and conscience utters no remon- 
strance A fearful paralyzing power, a spell of stupefaction, 
an insensibility unto death, is on the nation : and the Church 
and the ministry that ought to act as the nation's conscience, 
are drugged and possessed with the devil of silence ; so that 
the people are not arrested, not alarmed, not made sensible of 
what Satan's work is being accomplished upon them. This is 
a fearful treason against God and his Word, a terrible be- 
trayal of principle. 

It is as if the nerves of sensation in our system refused to 
warn us of injury by the sense of pain, so that, as under the 
power of chloroform, our bodies might be hacked and maimed, 
and we not aware of it ; as in a drunken stupor a man might 
be fatally burned, and not know it until too late. So, if the 
Church and the ministry, being God's sentinels to the nation, 
are bribed or drugged into silence, the nation, by such treach- 
ery, will be fatally ruined ere it is aware, and will utterly 
perish in its own corruption. Yet still we talk of the world's 
conversion, and here in these anniversaries we drive all the 
multiform machinery of the Societies we have set in motion, 
while every day our very power to manage them and to keep 
them from the villany of our own example grows less, and we 
go boasting of our health and strength and prosperity, with 
this terrific disease, under which we may be staggering as a 
drunken man upon the very last verge of God's endurance. 

The indulgence, maintenance, protection and defence of this 
sin, is the one great obstacle against the missionary influence 
and work. It cripples us, it manacles our energies, it palsies 
our efforts. We are in the condition of a man whose whole 
left side is paralyzed, so that all the strength and life of the 
right side are occupied and tasked with keeping the palsied 
half of the body from falling. We are like a man indulging in 
the use of ardent spirits to a degree just bordering continually 
on intoxication, so that all the soberness h.'ft is but just sufli- 



16 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

cient to keep him out of the gutter. We are unfit for God's 
work of overcoming the idolatry of the nations, while we are in 
slavish subjection to the worship of this ISIoloch at home. And 
this is the upshot of all our splendid training, all our vast gifts 
from God, all our preparations by truth, providence, and grace, 
for the world's deHverance from sin and Satan ! Is it such an 
agency, or the instrumentality of such a people, that can be re- 
lied upon for the world's conversi* n ? Eighteen hundred years 
Christ crucified has been known and preached on earth, as a 
righteous Judge and Saviour for the poor and needy, the op- 
pressed, and the children of the needy, and yet, in these last 
days, and in the nation now vaunted as the foremost Christian 
nation upon the face of the globe, the iniquity of slavery itself 
has been revived and maintained as the missionary agency and 
institution of the Gospel ! And all this comes from hiding in- 
stead of revealing that divine life which is the light of the 
world, which is the disclosure and destruction of sin, but being 
withheld leaves the world in darkness, and the church to be 
the nursing mother of the world's abominations. As in the 
absence of the solar light there is nothing but a cellar vegeta- 
tion, and the nourishing and running wild and free of monsters 
that shun the light and love the darkness, so in the absence 
or concealment of God's Word, a sickly, pallid, bloodless senti- 
mentalism of compromise and expediency takes the place of 
vigorous, virtuous life, and gigantic forms of iniquity breed 
and thrive. The tremendous despotism of slavery is the result 
of the policy of silence in the pulpit, silence of the ministry, 
the delaying and withholding of the Word of God. 

Where can such things end, if continued ? And if the con- 
science of the people is not reached and roused, what hope is 
there that the wickedness of the Government will ever be ar- 
rested ? They will go just as far as the people will let them 
— for their conscience is always lower and more insensible 
than that of the people, but never higher. The conscience of 
the people is the last defence of Liberty — the last element of 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 17 

righteous power. If the conscience of the people can be set 
right, then there is hope in God. If they disavow and tlii-ow 
off this iniquity, God will not lay it to their charge ; but if 
they do not resist it, God will certainly visit it upon them ; he 
will let them be destroyed by it. They have sown the wind — 
they shall reap the whirlwind. 

Here, then, are demonstrated the responsibility and duty of 
the church and the ministry, as God's appointed instrumental- 
ity for training and awakening the conscience of the people. 
How can national sins be reached in any other way ? And 
how in this way, except only by the Word of God, which is 
the sole instrument in the hands of the Spirit of God to con- 
vince the world of sin ? And how is the Word of God to be 
applied, except by the ministry, sustained by the church for 
this purpose, and on the Sabbath, when God gathers the peo- 
ple beneath its hearing and its power ? The whole salvation 
of our country — the wdiole possibility of redemption from the 
sin of slavery — rests on this question : Will the church and 
the ministry be faithful ? Will the ministry be faithful to God ? 
Will the church uphold and protect the ministry in such faith- 
fulness ? The ministry must speak out, and speak with a will, 
with a purpose, with a perseverance, and continued pressure on 
the conscience. 

The ministry must speak to move the country — not merely 
to relieve their own consciences, to clear their own skirts by a 
quiet declaration of opinion, or to enter a protest and then re- 
tire. The ministry can move the country, but not by resolu- 
tions in Associations or General Assemblies, while the pulpit 
is as silent as the grave. There is no courage whatever, and 
there may be very little faithfulness, in framing resolutions 
which may be but an anodyne to the conscience — a dispensa- 
tion from ever preaching on the subject. There are no general 
resolutions in the New Testament to stand in the place of pul- 
pit faithfulness in the application of God's Word ; but the rule 
was always, and everywhere, to renounce the hidden things of 
2* 



18 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

dishonesty, not walking in craftiness nor handling the Word of 
God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending 
ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. And 
again, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the Gospel 
of God with much contention, and as we were allowed of God 
to be put in trust with the Gospel, so we speak, not as pleasing 
men, but God, which trieth our hearts. 

Now, the Word of God is for aggression and conquest, and 
not a compromise with sin. The Word of God is a park of 
artillery — a swift-rushing mountain of thunderings and light- 
nings against sin, to overcome it and get it out of the world, 
and not a mere protest to save your own credit. The Word 
of God is to be thundered forth by the ministry for the discom- 
fiture of this great villany and impiety in the judgment seat, 
Hand in the legislature, and in the sin of man-stealing ; and this 
can be done in reliance upon God, and at his command, that 
the nation may be brought to repentance, may cry out, like any 
other sinners, Men and brethren, what shall we do ? and may 
be redeemed from this mighty iniquity. It is manifest that 
this requires an attention to it on the part of the church and 
the ministry, and a space for it in the Sabbath, and a procla- 
mation of God's truth in regard to it, such as never has been 
given — never has been made. This work is yet to be done, 
and the power and the glory of the Old Testament, the intense 
fires of God's love of justice, and his wrath against injustice 
and oppression, the forked and chain lightnings of the prophets, 
and the thunderbolts of Hebrew history, are yet to be shot 
upon this nation's sins. Who dare do it but a ministry com- 
missioned of God, and illuminated and inspired by his Spirit ? 
Who can do it but they only ? Whose appropriate business is 
it to do this but theirs, and what is the duty of the church but 
to support and protect them in doing this ? And when and 
how can they do this, except on the Sabbath — their day, 
God's day for instructing, reproving, and calling the world to 
repentance ? 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 19 

It is not a mincing, delicate, light notice of this iniquity that 
God requires, or the broad, hardened, brazen, unblushing 
abominations of the Government and the people demand, but 
a reiterated, reverberating, loud thundering of God's truth. It 
is very easy to say a soft, apologizing -word now and then in 
regard to it, and excite no anger, no disturbance, and do no 
good, rouse no man's conscience ; and not a few, in what they 
do say or intimate on such a subject, seem to be begging pardon 
of the congregation for such a painful allusion, instead of utter- 
ing God's voice fearlessly, grandly, and declaring. Thou art 
the man ! 

In this matter, Christ's dividing line is true : He that is not 
for me is against me. If men will not now speak out and act 
out against slavery, their voice and influence are in favor of it. 
If the ministers of the Gospel, instead of the policy of silence, 
had poured out their vials, as God's commissioned angels, and 
let the thunderings, lightnings and earthquakes shake the 
heavens and the earth, this iniquity would long since have been 
arrested. It is only under the repression and forced silence of 
the Word of God that it has been able to advance with such 
giant strides, till it has taken possession of the Senatorial, Rep- 
resentative, Executive, and Judicial branches of our Govern- 
ment. 

Now, Satan will never cast out Satan, and this iniquity is to 
be stayed and turned back only by the Word of God, and by 
the Church and ministry being faithful to that Word. "■• If 
they had stood in my counsel," says Jehovah, " and had caused 
my people to hear my words, then they should have turned 
them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings." 
Just so now. But this great and mighty result of repentance 
for sin is not to be got at by silence in regard to the sin ; and they 
who keep silence in a time of temptation and trial do, in fact, 
defend and daub the sin with untempered mortar. They may 
say that they are good Anti-Slavery men, as much opposed to 
this iniquity as any one ; but their silence gives consent, and 



20 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

carries them over into the ranks of the enemy. Their preten- 
sions of Anti-Slavery principles are, indeed, excellent, if the 
principle itself could be got at for use. They say it is in them 
in esse, as the diamond is in carbon ; and so indeed every lump 
of charcoal, if it could speak, might say, " I am a diamond — 
do not treat me as if I were merely a piece of charred wood. 
In potential essence, the diamond is in my nature." 

Ah, yes, my good friend, and if you would only tell me how 
I may bring it out, and keep it in the form of a diamond — 
how I may catch the essence, and make it stay put — you will 
make my fortune. But, alas ! the world will never see any- 
thing in you but charcoal ! Your diamond nature does not 
speak out ; your charcoal does. 

Just so, there are many in the ministry who will be much 
offended if you tell them they are not opposed to slavery — 
therefore, in effect, defend it. They will affirm that, in poten- 
tial essence, the abhorrence of slavery is in them, though they 
do not go to the extreme of ever speaking against it. 

Aye, and the very difficulty is, that it never makes itself 
known except by a most potential silence. It is as silent and 
invisible as the diamond is in the charcoal, or the light in a 
mass of solid anthracite. On this principle, there is not a dark 
subterranean coal mine, or bed, or pit, in existence, but what 
is a region of brilliant, glorious light ; but, unfortunately, it 
needs a great many manipulations of science, a great many 
torturing processes of art, and operations of fire and water, to 
extract the material of light, and put it in shining order. 

And just so with not a few, who should be lights in the 
ministry, but are rather like invisible, unsmelted native ores. 
If they might be subjected to the necessary roastings and 
smeltings and purifications, and the word of God extracted 
from them in visible, glorious form and shape, confronting and 
exposing the gross and damning features of this sin, then indeed 
it would be a powerful and conqu(M'ing testimony. But what is 
principle good lor, if not to come forth in action in the time of 



AND THE DUTY OF THE MINISTRY. 21 

trial, if not to withstand temptation, to rebuke iniquity, and 
protect the weak and down-trodden from the wicked and the 
strong? What is the worth of silent, inactive, concealed prin- 
ciple, whole acres of it, what better than treachery, or salt that 
has lost its savor, and is not fit even for a dunghill ? "What is 
the worth of a million candles, each hidden under its own 
bushel ? What is the light of the Christian Church and the 
Christian ministry given for, but to be the light of the world ? 
If it is hidden from the world out of fear, out of a selfish ex- 
pediency, it is darkness ; and how great is that darkness . 

It makes us think of the recent discovery that every cubic 
mile of ocean contains more than two pounds weight of solid 
silver. How potential! It makes the mouth of a miser water; 
but he is forced to think. If I could only get at it ! Oh, thou 
mine of incalculable wealth ! Two million tons of solid silver 
in the Atlantic ! Ye potential, silvery waves, if I could but 
evoke, by some concentrated, irresistible chemistry, your hid- 
den riches! 

Ay, but there's the rub. 'Tis of no more use to you than the 
commonest puddle of sea-water ; whole leagues of it, nay, the 
all-surroundinnj ocean, at your command, of no more value 
than the smallest secluded nook before your own cottage on 
the East River. And just so, a whole cubic mile of such 
Anti-Slavery ministers with sealed lips, or as many as could 
stand together in the dry bottom of the ocean, would be of no 
use whatever with their principles of liberty that never speak 
out — their upright hearts, but silent tongues and pulpits. 
They are upright as the palm tree, but they speak not ; and 
because of their own policy of silence, they hate him that re- 
buketh in the gate ; they are not valiant for the truth upon the 
earth, and, in consequence of their silence and conservative in- 
fluence, the few that do speak out seem extravagant and eccen- 
tric, and are marked as madmen or fanatics ; they become 
objects of derision, as noticeable as poor Christian and Faithful 
were in passing through Vanity Fair — simple, innocent crea- 



22 THE SIN OF SLAVERY, 

tures who said, We buy the truth. Truth ! Go to the Tract 
House ! 

But truth is not only unpopular and inexpedient on such a 
subject as the sin of Slavery, but exceedingly dangerous. It 
is not proper to be brought into the pulpit, nor mentioned on 
the Sabbath — that sacred day of rest, when every irritating 
and disturbing theme should be kept far aloof from the Sanc- 
tuary and from our hearts, for we come to the Church to be 
comforted, and political preaching is an outrage on our feelings, 
and a desecration of the day of God ; and preaching on the 
sin of Slavery is political preaching, and if you preach such 
preaching, it offends the pew-owners, and drives away the peo- 
ple from the church, and prevents them from hiring pews, and 
diminishes our revenues, so that, if you preach such preaching, 
the best interests of the Church and society require that we 
should unsettle you. 

Well done, Simon Magus ! There you stand ; unveil your 
face, step forth into the light ; only avow that you buy your 
minister, and use him, or lay him on the shelf, just as you 
would a case of umbrellas or a bale of silk, that you settle him 
for pew revenues, and that your pulpit is up at auction to the 
highest bidder for the man who will insure you the greatest 
sum total of pew rentals, and your poAver is at an end. The 
statement of such things is enough to make them a by-word 
and a hissing. You never can get the people to admit that the 
final end of God's Word is just simply to keep the finances of 
a society above water, or as a locomotive to drag them up-hill. 
God's Word is given for edifying and saving souls, and not 
merely building temples and paying for them. And the minis- 
ters of God's Word, if called to preach in Nineveh and fleeing 
to Tarshish, will not much longer find the churches to be mere 
packet ships in which they can snugly sleep out the storm, and 
pay their ])assage by concealing their mission. 

Concealment is not the law of God's Word, but maxifesta- 
Tiox, and in times of danger and of treachery, you are com- 



AND THE DUTY OF TIIK MINISTRY. 23 

pelled to vary the ordinary law of God's AVord, as rains and 
gentle showers, and to come down in a perfect cataract, as if 
all the windows of heaven were opened, and the fountains of 
the great deep broken up. We may learn something here 
from our colored brethren. During the war of our Revolution, 
it is said that at a particular important point of his lines, 
Washington found his sentinels, night after night, picked off by 
a party that could not be detected. At length he committed 
the care of that point to a sagacious, trusty negro, on service in 
the army ; a negro citizen (let Secretary Cass mark it) was 
particularly trusted by Washington. He told him the nature 
of the danger, and bade him have all his wits about him, re- 
membering the watchword, if any suspicious movement was 
before him, which was to call out, Who goes there ? three 
times, and then fire. The faithful, keen-witted negro reflected, 
and made up his mind. Past midnight, his watchfnl ear caught 
the stealthy advance of the enemy, and just waiting long 
enough to be sure of his aim, he levelled his gun, and called 
out, in one sentence, at one breath, AYho goes dere tree time ? 
and then fired. The foe was shot and discovered, the alarm 
given, and the post saved. Sometimes we must thus concen- 
trate, and give the warning and the shot at the same moment ; 
not here a little and there a little, but all at once, and blow 
after blow followed up so rapidly that neither compromise nor 
retreat shall be possible. 



• # 



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